Nobody here but us tea partiers!

Oh, and the occasional racist

The tatterdemalion ranks of the Tea Party movement want it clearly understood that there is no significant racist component to their political activism. They oppose President Obama because of his policies. That's all. Certainly not his race. (But maybe his secret religion. Or his secret birthplace. Or his secret plan to round up white people and sterilize them.)

That's the take-home message: The Tea Party movement is a patriotic political movement without a scintilla of racism. (And no minorities, for that matter.) Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than at Free Republic, the Fresno-based on-line locus of Tea Party activism. For example, consider the measured tones of Free Republic's commenters (you have to be a member to comment) on the matter of the First Lady's trip to Spain.

Does not matter where our taxes take her..she will always look like she just walked off the plantation in Georgia or Mississippi.

Heck. That's just classy with a triple-K.

While it's not an official state visit when the First Lady is traveling privately in the absence of the President, no such excursion can avoid its political overtones. In the matter of the trip to Spain, Michelle Obama has been invited by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia to join the royal couple at their summer palace on Majorca. Naturally the White House was pleased to accept the invitation and Mrs. Obama will therefore be an unofficial goodwill ambassador to Spain.

The press photographers have swarmed the First Lady and Free Republic posted a clip. The Freepers tried to keep it positive, of course, with their acute sensitivity to women's fashions:

Re; blk/white one strap dress
This skank is a stain of the history of First Ladies.
She needs to cover up and try to show some dignity befitting her station.

(How soon they forget how much they hated Hillary.)

Did anyone chide the commenter who made the “plantation” remark? My goodness, no!

“Does not matter where our taxes take her..she will always look like she just walked off the plantation in Georgia or Mississippi.”

You nailed it.

The Freepers also had some concerns for Spain.

Spain is a beautiful country.
By being there, Mrs. Obama spoils it.
Everywhere this trash couple goes is stained forever.

“Forever”? Wow. Not even George W. Bush had that power (except, perhaps, for the permanence of the deaths of the victims of his unnecessary wars).

Some press accounts referred to Mrs. Obama as FLOTUS, a fairly well-known acronym for “First Lady of the United States.” When not describing the First Lady as a human stain, playful Freepers occasionally gave her another nickname.

Frankly, I think the WH has kept Sasquatch relatively under wraps. They probably realize that she is a very polarizing figure, not to mention a big mouth, who would likely reveal her blind hatred of white America in an undeniable fashion sooner or later.

“Blind hatred.” Say, let's go look up “projection” in a psych textbook. I'll bet we are in for an amusing surprise!

Later this month Mrs. Obama is hauling the family to the Gulf coast to encourage tourism in a region of Florida relatively unscathed by the BP oil spill, thereby giving a lift to the local economy. I wonder what the denizens of Free Republic will do then, thinking of President Obama's family in the context of oil slicks and tar balls. Why, it almost writes itself! And that's good, too, because idiotic shit-for-brains racists have trouble coming up with original ideas. They prefer to react reflexively with their unevolved lizard brains.

In the meantime, look at this, bully boys! You'll pee your pants when Sasquatch comes to get you!

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Who was that masked Hispanic?

I know you are, but what am I?

Yes, we live in entertaining times. The Republicans wallow in the Slough of Despond (taking such comfort as they can in the mud they find there) and the right-wing is contorted in angst and paranoia. (Are they really paranoid if we're out to get them?) In past years, it seemed that no GOP talking point was too absurd to be treated with respect by the supposedly mainstream media. Now, however, it appears that the Republican noise machine may have blown a gasket or two. When they pumped up the propaganda organ to attack President Obama's first nomination to the Supreme Court, quite a few people recognized hot air when they saw it.

Nice.

In particular, the snide attacks on Sonia Sotomayor's “first Hispanic” status deflated rather quickly. It must be quite embarrassing to lecture someone for not doing his homework, only to find out that your “correction” needs correcting. In case you missed it, the argument was that Benjamin Cardozo was actually the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court. He served on the high court from 1932 to 1938. Here's a comment from Israel Jewish News that was cheerfully picked up by Free Republic:

Uh, I guess that Obama's PR team isn't capable of looking back in Supreme Court history 70 years? I know the drive-by media can't possibly do any research—that's nothing new. If Obama told them he was going to put the first person on the moon, they would probably just report it without remembering we already did that too.

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Was Justice Cardozo a twofer? Hispanic as well as Jewish? It's a bit of a puzzler, because if Cardozo is considered Hispanic, then so am I.

And I doubt that I am.

Wikipedia cites a biography of Benjamin Cardozo as the source for the claim that the Cardozo family considered itself to be descended from the Marranos of Portugal. These were Jews who converted to Christianity (as least in appearance) to avoid expulsion from the Iberian peninsula (the western end of Europe that comprises both Spain and Portugal). There's no particular reason to doubt the Cardozo family folklore. The last name is common enough in Portuguese circles (although the “Cardoza” variant is dominant).

It's quite possible, therefore, that Benjamin Cardozo was descended from Portuguese Jews. Does that make him Hispanic? It gets down to a matter of conflicting definitions.

My own family would deny being Hispanic, although we might concede being Latino. That opens up a whole new controversy, of course.

“Latino” can be construed as referring to Latin America. That would leave out the Portuguese. It could also be construed as referring to descent from Latin-based Roman culture. If one tries to pare that back to those cultures that retained Latin-based languages, we have the nations whose primary tongues are the Romance languages of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Romanian. Good luck sorting that out.

In this country, one sometimes hears the term “Luso-American” applied to people of Portuguese descent. (Or, as my college roommate liked to render it, “Loser-Americans.”) It's not very common, however, and I know of no consensus among the members of my ethnic cohort concerning a preferred nomenclature. We aren't a particularly overt minority.

Sonia Sotomayor, on the other hand, is a thoroughly unambiguous case. The Supreme Court nominee is a puertorriqueña who will clearly be the high court's first Hispanic/Latina member. The critics who advance the name of Cardozo as a counterexample are just plain wrong, but I understand their point. They're gleefully mocking the Obama administration for failing to perform the due diligence that would have discovered a false fact. The Bush administration, after all, used to find false facts all the time.

It was sort of its speciality.

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Scenes from my father

See no evil

Dad has tried to commiserate with me about the fate of my generation and those of this grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We're doomed, you see, to live under a communist dictatorship imposed by liberals. He deflates like an old balloon when I shake my head, say “That's completely ridiculous, Dad,” and remind him that his eldest son is a flaming liberal himself. He gets morose and sullen, which is unfortunate, but at least it dams up the flood of right-wing hysteria and leaves us in peace for a while. I go find something else to do while he broods about the remote possibility of being raptured into heaven before President Obama can declare the United States an atheist-communist-Muslim-libertine dictatorship. Yeah, I know. Some of these things don't go together.

I call it my father's “political Alzheimer's,” since he's possessed of all of his faculties and seems to be able to reason rationally as long as the topic is not politics (or, admittedly, religion). Since no political debate between us can go on more than a few minutes before it gets overheated and it's necessary to shut it down, we tend to avoid the near occasion of argument. Or at least I do.

My father and I were mostly on our best behavior during my Thanksgiving visit, so I wonder if his pent-up need to badger me will erupt during Christmas. It's possible. The family has mellowed in many ways—such as not demanding that I attend mass with them—but old habits endure and Dad's pugnacity may recover. We'll see.

It's one thing to disagree with my father, which I do vigorously (though slightly hobbled by filial devotion). It's another to be disgusted with him. That's tougher. Perhaps it first arose when Dad thrust the “Clinton Body Count” under my nose and I realized he expected me to take it seriously. If he could believe nonsense like that, it was clear he could believe almost any crap. This has been amply borne out in the years since and that's been bad enough.

During Thanksgiving, however, I discovered he's amusing himself with racist humor. That's really beyond the pale and embarrasses me enormously. You'd think being an ethnic minority ourselves that we'd be a bit more sensitized to racial humor. Apparently not.

Dad has a relatively high-speed Internet connection these days, which is a great relief from last year's anemic dial-up modem service. It's still not super fast, but it's tolerable. He now leaves his connection active most of the time and he waved me over to it when I asked about checking my e-mail. His AOL account (which he shares with Mom) was open, but I didn't use it, opening a separate browser window and logging into my Yahoo mail account. I was being virtuous by refraining from poking around in my father's e-mail, but I also had no desire to see what right-wing spam he was wallowing in. At least I knew he was no longer forwarding it to me (for the most part) and I wasn't going to be nosy.

But Dad's computer also had the latest photos of the great-grandsons in his picture folder. When he told me about them I naturally took a look and downloaded some cute portraits of my nephews to my data stick. But there were other pictures, too, and some were nauseating. No, not what you're thinking. At least if you're thinking porn. Unless you mean political porn.

Dad has received, and seen fit to save, a photo that depicts Barack Obama as a shoeshine boy kneeling at the feet of a grinning Sarah Palin. How droll. I later heard it was distributed to members of a Rush Limbaugh fan site, which is probably how Dad got it (although I don't know that Limbaugh himself had anything to do with it). I refrained from mentioning to my father that I had seen it and was ashamed that he had saved it.

I won't post the picture, since a description suffices, but I have since discovered the original photo that was doctored to create the Obama-Palin pic. The photographer is understandably miffed at being ripped off, especially since the prankster who modified the photo left the original attribution on it. Ted Szukalski is not amused at being portrayed by a plagiarist as a dabbler in racial humor. He posted a comment on his website to express his dismay.


The shoe-shine gag was apparently not enough. Dad also found it worthwhile to save a political cartoon that depicts Sen. Obama sitting in a pew with a bag over his head while a black minister (presumably Rev. Wright) screams “Kill Whitey!”


Now perhaps it's not supposed to be Rev. Wright after all, since we know that Wright's cardinal sin was to utter a Falwellian “God damn America.” Maybe cartoonist Brian Fairrington was merely exaggerating a little bit for effect, and not really implying that Sen. Obama was willing to condone hyperbolic hate speech. Maybe. Anyway, Fairrington has found part of his audience in my father—and whichever of Dad's correspondents considered the cartoon worthy of saving and passing along.

Next time I think I'll just ask Dad to send me the family photos instead of having me look them up for myself. I don't want to go back into his picture folder. Thanks, but no thanks. Good family relations (at least to the degree possible) require that I refrain.

And if he wanted me to see what I found mixed amidst the family pix, then I'm a bit angry in addition to being disgusted.

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Before and after Bradley

Courting the racism vote

Hillary Clinton's upset victory over Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary has some pundits muttering about the Bradley effect, the possibility that a significant number of white voters lied to pollsters about their willingness to vote for a black candidate. It's named after Tom Bradley, the former mayor of Los Angeles, who was pipped at the political post in the California gubernatorial election in 1982, despite having led his opponent by a significant margin in the polls immediately preceding the balloting. Thus did California miss its chance to elect the first post-Reconstruction African-American governor in history.

Since it was a surge in Clinton's vote share rather than a big drop in Obama's pre-election strength that led to the New York senator's triumph, it seems unlikely that the Bradley effect was at work in the Granite State. Nevertheless, racism sometimes lurks under the radar and in especially egregious cases politicians try to appeal to it.

That was Mayor Sam Yorty's ploy in 1969, when City Councilman Tom Bradley nearly defeated him outright in the mayoral primary election. Yorty pulled out all the stops in the run-off, warning the white citizens of Los Angeles that black power was threatening to take over city hall. The smear campaign worked and Yorty won one more term. Defeated but not despairing, Bradley regrouped and came back to oust Yorty in 1973, inaugurating a distinguished two-decade tenure as mayor of Los Angeles.

It's possible, therefore, that Bradley experienced the baneful impact of the so-called Bradley effect in two separate elections. That first defeat in 1969 perhaps suggested to some people that California's white voters were still sufficiently prejudiced against minority candidates to be exploited for political advantage. This lesson was taken to heart the very next year when the state superintendent of public instruction ran for re-election.

Max Rafferty was a harbinger of the future right-wing era. He had been elected in 1962 to California's highest elective educational post by harping on the evils of progressive education and espousing the “back to basics” movement. He spent his time in office railing against liberals and trying to ban textbooks and reference materials of which he disapproved. Rafferty also harbored further political ambitions. In 1968 he ran for the U.S. Senate, denying incumbent Thomas Kuchel renomination in the Republican primary. However, the abrasive and combative campaign he had run in the GOP primary did not work for Rafferty in the general election, which he lost to Alan Cranston.

Since he was in the midst of his second term as state superintendent of public instruction when he lost the U.S. Senate race, Rafferty has time to lick his wounds and prepare to seek the consolation prize of another term as education chief. He began the 1970 campaign as a strong favorite. However, Rafferty's senate campaign had damaged his image as an educator in a nonpartisan elective office. He drew opposition in the primary election, one of them his deputy superintendent. Wilson Riles decided to seek the top post himself, as did educator Julian Nava. Neither one came close to defeating Rafferty in the primary, but their combined vote managed to deny Rafferty a majority vote by the thinnest of margins. The election would have to be decided with a run-off vote in November between the top two candidates, Rafferty and Riles.

The aftermath of the 1970 primary election was one of the most racist campaigns in the latter half of the 20th century. It lacked only the overt, explicit race-baiting rhetoric of such politicians as George Wallace, Lester Maddox, or Orval Faubus. It was a discreet sort of racism, but it was scarcely subtle. Rafferty's campaigns paid for a series of newspaper advertisements that contrasted his record with his rival's, much to the incumbent's advantage. That, of course, was to be expected. The unusual part was that every Rafferty ad featured pictures of both the incumbent superintendent and his opponent. Rafferty appeared as a smiling, open-faced white man, looking as avuncular as could be. Wilson Riles, by contrast, was difficult to see. His portrait was rendered in such dark tones, exaggerating his actual complexion, that only gleaming teeth and spots of white in his eyes could be distinguished from the black blob that was his face. The message was completely obvious: “Vote for whitey and beware the darkie!” Rafferty's campaign people were too genteel to include the actual words, but the words would have been redundant.

Despite the incumbent's best (or worst) efforts, each California Poll published between the primary election and the run-off showed Riles building his share of the vote while Rafferty continued to fall short of a majority. On election day, Wilson Riles was elected as the new state superintendent of public instruction by a vote of 54.1% to 45.9%. It was the end of Rafferty's career in elective office.

The rejection of Max Rafferty's unsubtle appeal to white racism in 1970 was a hopeful sign that the state electorate was outgrowing old prejudices. It was a moment of triumph and satisfaction, but it was also premature. The election of 1982, for which the term Bradley effect was coined, still lay in the future. And we still have plenty to learn.

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